Dear Colleagues,

Please be on the lookout during the week of January 23 for an email message inviting you to participate in the FDP Faculty Workload Survey.  We hope that you will choose to take the 15-30 minutes necessary to complete the survey and contribute to this national effort to streamline administrative processes in federally-funded research.

Our campus participates in the Federal Demonstration project (FDP). The FDP is an association of ten federal agencies and 119 institutional recipients of federal funds, including administrative, faculty and technical representation, and research policy organizations that work to streamline the administration of federally sponsored research. FDP members of all sectors cooperate in identifying, testing, and implementing new, more effective ways of managing federal research grants.

This year, the FDP is planning to conduct a second web-based faculty workload survey (the first was in 2005) to explore the impact of federal regulations on the time faculty spend actively conducting research. FDP will contact faculty with active, federally funded research projects in AY 10-11.  The data collected will be used to determine priorities for the FDP, and to make recommendations to the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) and federal agencies for reforming and reducing research-related burdens without lessening accountability and compliance with federal regulations.  

I ask your help in responding to this survey when you are contacted by Survey Sciences Group in Ann Arbor, Michigan, the organization administering the survey.  Your responses are very important in providing accurate information to the federal government on the true regulatory burden faced by our research community.  Your data will be collected via a secure web-based survey interface.  Identifying information and survey responses will be kept in separate databases to minimize risk of identifiers being linked with survey responses.  The final dataset provided to the research team for analysis will not have any unique identifiers.

This study has been approved by the University of South Florida's AAHRPP-accredited Institutional Review Board, and I have authorized their IRB to approve our portion of the study as well.

Please see http://sites.nationalacademies.org/PGA/fdp/index.htm for more information about FDP and the previous 2005 Faculty Burden Survey.  Please contact Melanie Loots, mloots@illinois.edu, if you have any questions about the Survey.

Thank you in advance for your participation.

Sincerely,

Robert A. Easter
Interim Vice Chancellor for Research